


Navigating by the Stars

by weakinteraction



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Trick or Treat - extra treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:03:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction





	Navigating by the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [apatternedfever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/apatternedfever/gifts).



"Hey! Are you ..."

Inanna turns around and simply smiles, knowing that doing so answers the question perfectly inadequately.

The two girls turn to each other and share a silent moment of disbelieving pleasure. Then the one who shouted asks, "Can we have a picture?"

He nods and the two girls come up and take their selfies -- each in turn, then both of them together, following some unspoken agreement between them as to which phone to look at first.

"Thank you!" the braver of the two, the one who shouted out to him in the first place, says as they unwrap themselves from around him.

"My pleasure," he says, saving his broadest smile for the one who doesn't speak.

They run away, leaving him alone in the park. He breathes deeply; the scents of night-blooming flowers fill his nostrils. He could stay here all night, but it is time to be elsewhere. He has a gig in Perth tomorrow; it is nearly dawn there, and the plane that is the cover story for his travel is already in the air.

He doesn't like hiding this aspect of his powers but Ananke says that it is still too early for them to reveal too much to the mortals. When they can, he has decided, he will do a series of gigs chasing the night around the globe for as long as he can manage before collapsing with exhaustion.

He looks up, finds Orion, focuses his gaze on the three stars of the belt. Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka. He went through an astronomical phase, in his early teens: the perfect solitary pursuit for an ill-at-ease romantic. He knows all their names. And in the back of his mind, in the memories that aren't quite his, he knows older names too. The names the Mesopotamians used when they described how Inanna danced among the stars on her way to grieve with her sister in the underworld.

Things have changed since then. Even the pole star is different. The pole star in the memories is too faint to be seen in the city's light-polluted sky.

He looks across from Orion to Aldebaran in Taurus, the eye of Gugalanna, the great bull of heaven.

Starlight connects everything, eternally. Time does not pass for a ray of light, it simply _is_ , connecting impossibly distant points in space and time. The whole universe is connected by a shining web of starlight. He knows this in every fibre of his being, as instinctive to him as breathing. Some of the others have asked him how he does it, and he does not how to answer. He just does.

And he has. He is half the world away, standing in another park at the start of a new day. The Sun creeps over the horizon; he has only just made it in time.

An early morning jogger passes him, then draws to a halt. He pulls out his earbuds and turns around, a quizzical look on his face.

"Hey! Are you ..."


End file.
